Put a finger to your lips, an ear to the open window and, in these still
moments over the dying traffic noise, you will hear the sound of
singing. This is the day and night when men and women, unselfconsciously
and by no means drunk, raise their voices in dodgy harmony to declare,
in the deep midwinter, a bottomless faith in the possibility of renewal.

Carollers patrol our suburbs and shopping malls – ding, dong merrily on
high street – and we, of all colours and ethnicities, will put down our
bags and beam upon them kindly, savouring their contagious optimism. We
may even – mumble-mumble, forgot the words – be tempted to chime in.

It’s not a sectarian thing, not unique to Christian worship nor, indeed
to having any faith at all apart from the common English creed of
kindness to strangers and confidence in the year to come. Some Jews,
around their Sabbath tables tonight, will give thanks for 350 years of
peaceful residence on these islands and hum a Hebrew hymn to the tune of
Good King Wenceslas. Many Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Shintoist and
Zoroastrian tots in the diversity of our nurseries will bewilder their
immigrant parents with God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.

Families – nuclear, unwed, same-sex and allsorts – will huddle around
the telly on Sunday afternoon mouthing along to the annual festival of
lessons and carols from Kings, thinking of nothing but the season to be
jolly, the time to end the year’s sorrows and begin anew in hopeful
expectation.

This is not the moment to carp at the tiny-minded officials who regulate
every detail of our lives into tidy boxes, since the schools and
councils that to tried ban Christmas and its carols in condescension to
a spurious multiculturalism have lost not only their own road sense but
the plot of how this country came into being and how it maintained its
identity through waves of immigration and tides of fortune, good and
bad. Our history is one of benign unity, expressed around occasions that
have lost all vestige of their original meaning – the Ashes, Bonfire
Night, Boxing Day, carols on Christmas Eve.

Singing carols is as much a mark of Englishness as drinking beer
unchilled, wearing checked pullovers one size too large and giving up
one’s seat on the bus to the elderly and child-bound – all of which are
imperilled in present uncertainties. So is the act of singing itself.
Proof its parlous state was brought into our living rooms by The Choir
on BBC2, the most shocking and compelling piece of television to be
aired in the whole of this para-reality year.

The series, itself a product of pseudo-reality, sent the London Symphony
Orchestra choirmaster, Gareth Malone, into a bog-standard comprehensive
to whip together a choir that could compete in the choral Olympics in
Beijing. What Malone found at Northolt High was a school so apathetic to
the heightws of civilisation that its music teacher dared not mention
Mozart and hardly any of its teenagers had ever raised a voice in song.

The auditions he conducted were literally ear-opening. Kids who bobbed
their heads for hours each day to mechanised syncopations on their
headsets were unable to sustain a line of simple melody, to know when
they were out of tune, or to appreciate that their grunts and nasal
wails were in any way different or inferior to the slick hits of the
stars they were attempting to emulate. I have rarely slumped so low in
my sofa, so alarmed at the erasure of hope and glory in a sink school
system that raises citizens who have no access to the idea of beauty.

Malone, grimly optimistic and infinitely ingenious, selected 30 children
who recorded a demo disc on just seven rehearsals and won a place in
Beijing, only to be eliminated, predictably enough, in the first round.
No matter. The Northolt girls and boys were transformed from sullen
endurance to self-pride. Gone was the look of defeat in their eyes. A
deadened instinct, buried beneath conformist pressures, had been touched
and revived by the breath of an inspiring master. Thirty children found
their voices and will never fall dumb again.

If ever there was a message of hope it was in the tears they shed,
Malone most helplessly of all, in the aftermath of the elimination
verdict – tears that had nothing to do with failure and everything with
the rediscovery of a human potential that had been crushed and negated
in the struggle to achieve a secure and dignified foothold in this most
mixed and competitive of societies. The act of singing taught these
children that it is possible to transcend the misery of broken families
and immigration blight, the prevalence of drugs and casual sex, and the
inertia of an education system that has been programmed to care more for
results and averages than for the individual child. Singing the Paul
Simon ballad Bridge over Troubled Waters brought feeling into numbed
lives. Singing it in three and four-part harmony with cameo solos
brought a spirit of community to these young people that neither school
nor society had engendered. Jamie Oliver might have changed school
dinners with his TV series but Gareth Malone showed that we are we are
more, much more, than what we eat.

There is nothing so liberating as opening your chest cavity and giving
vent to a song. Never mind if you’re flat or sharp, in tune or out, the
physical release is one the great forms of catharsis, the way we become
whole with ourselves. I walked alone on an empty Basque beach for hours
in early summer, belting out old favourites whose lyrics had gone a bit
blurry in the mind but whose healing force was undimmed.

If you have never sung a scratch Messiah or Elijah at the Royal Albert
Hall, join the next Easter blast. Fill the dome with your voice: it will
feel better than any physical workout. Singing is the oldest human need
after food and the sexual urge, the need to give voice to wonderment and
joy. It is the beginnings of spiritual awareness, the engine of social
harmony, the flowering of love.

So sing out one and all this Christmas Eve. Sing a carol while you’re
waiting for a bus, Silent Night in the Heathrow departure lounge, Come
all Ye Faithful on the clogged M25. Sing because it will annoy the
killjoys and Scrooges, the pc-enforcers, the congestion chargers, the
flight cancellers. Sing because it feels so good. Sing for happiness,
sing for hope, sing for a better year ahead, for peace on earth and joy
to all mankind.

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